Matthew Haynes’s vintage nonfiction piece “Some Kind of Nigger” first appeared in Issue 13 as part of Fringe’s Ethnos Issue. Editor-in-chief Lizzie Stark corresponded with Matthew about what it was like to see this piece in print again, three years later.

Looking back at your piece now, about three years after it was published, what do you notice?

I notice how I would like to change some phrasings, tighten some bolts. While I still like the short succinctness of the piece, there might be some places to expand.

This story takes place in a bunch of different physical locations. Did you move around a lot when you were a kid?

No.  I was born late enough in the chain that we stayed in Butte for the most part.  There was a small stint in Wyoming, and then a few years in Hawai’i.  Before me, my mother was married to an Air Force man, so many of my brothers and sisters moved around.

In this piece, you’re confronting what it means to be half, half Hawaiian, half white, and from the story, claimed by neither race. Do you still feel this way? How has your relationship with your racial identity changed over time?

I’ve discovered that in homogenous areas, they see my color, which abruptly forces me to be aware of my color.  In Idaho, where I live now, I see my color all the time.  In Hawai’i, I don’t see my color, rather I hear my non-color because the locals hear my non-pidgin.  I look so local, but I speak like a Northwesterner.

I’ve explored this in some other pieces and realized that half doesn’t exist.  It’s an idea.  That’s great for my head.  But then, the world, at large, is not lived in my head.  I still have to interact.

At the end of the essay, in a devastating scene, you attempt to bleach yourself white in a bathtub, in order to hide. How old were you then, and what was going through your head? Do you still have this desire to blend in with one race or the other?

I believe I was 10.

I am an over-emotional person.  Was as a child.  Am as an adult.  I try to balance this with reading lots of logic, science, things that are tethered to rock.  (Though, sometimes, science and logic leads to over-abstraction, which leads me to being emotional–the tether breaking.)  I was thinking about fitting in then.  I was thinking about never wanting to be unique, and at the same time, thinking how the world would never be enough for me.  It still isn’t, at times.

Mmm.  I used to want to blend into my Hawaiianess so badly.  Because I am brown, I wanted to “act” brown, which looks a certain way in Hawai’i.  Sure there are the intellectuals who don’t, but, honestly, I don’t care about their acceptance.  I wanted to hang out at fire pits, drinking beer, playing ukulele…. That kind of acceptance seems more pungent.  Not now.  I’m not hiding, nor am I blending.

If this is a story about not-belonging anywhere (not at the whites’ water fountain, not at the blacks’ water fountain), do you still feel like you don’t belong?

I’ve stopped caring if I belong, and much of the time would rather not belong to anything so specific.  Apathy maybe?  A dash of nihilism?

Although, the other day in Bikram yoga I was astonished to be the only person, of color, in a room of 70 people.  People kept smiling at me.

Tell us a little bit about what other types of things you write. Is this typical of your work?

This is pretty typical of my style of writing.  But I roam many topics and try to operate in different styles.  My poetry helps to keep my words unstuck.

Did publication in Fringe change anything for you?

It certainly started a good launch of publishing for me.  It also gave me a sort of online confidence.

What have you been writing lately?

I have been working on a new novel placed in my hometown of Butte.  A father dies one winter from drunken exposure under a burned out Ponderosa leaving behind a rattled wife, and two boys, one just graduating high school.  The boys set off trying to uncover the story leading to their father’s death; the older dealing with what it means to love and be loved, and the younger unsure of what it means to be living.  The wife/mother meets a new man, but would probably rather be alone and is wrestling with the notion of how solitude doesn’t have to mean lonely.

I have a collection of nonfiction that I’m shopping around.

I just finished a screen play that plays in speculative fiction a bit.  Post apocalypse.  However, the world hasn’t ended, per se.  Rather it is under theocratic rule (maybe the world really had ended).  A girl is born who can topple the religious rule and redeem the world.  It’s probably overly philosophical, but I think i’ve written some pretty bad ass fight scenes.

What have you been reading lately?

Student papers.  ’Nough said.